It’s amazing how much can happen in a year. Last April, when we open sourced a set of server and data center designs under the name “Open Compute Project,” we weren’t sure what to expect. It was our hope that we could inspire the industry to be a little more open, a little more innovative, and a little more focused on energy efficiency.

Today, as more than 500 people converge on San Antonio for the third OCP Summit, I think we can safely say that we’ve already achieved much more than that. The momentum that has gathered behind the project – especially in the last six months – has been nothing short of amazing.

For you ADD people who won't be patient enough to read the whole post. The ending is one of the most interesting things to wake you up to what OCP is doing.

On the other side of the equation, we’ve started to see a convergence of voices among the consumers of this technology around where we think the industry would benefit from standardization and where we think the opportunities for innovation are. Open Rack and Project Scorpio are perfect examples of these consumer voices coming together and communicating their needs more clearly – and the new Open Rack designs debuting today from HP and Dell are perfect examples of the supplier community’s response to that emerging clarity.

Perhaps most importantly, though, is the industry’s decreasing focus on what OCP founding board member Andy Bechtolsheim calls “gratuitous differentiation” and its increasing focus on driving innovation where it matters. This is the work we have ahead of us in the coming months, as we pursue even greater advances and efficiencies in scale computing technology. It is no small task that we’ve set for ourselves – but as the last year has proven, we can accomplish anything if we work together in the open.